Excitingly appealing archaeology.

Follow-up: Military vets help DOI play catch-up

You may recall this posting from a few weeks ago involving the Department of Interior and some 78 million uncatalogued items in its collection. Here is an update:

Some U.S. military veterans are finding work helping sort through a massive government archaeological collection that has been neglected for decades.

The collection dates to the 1930s, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers started building dozens of locks, dams and reservoirs, and the ground beneath them was excavated for archaeological treasures.

In recent weeks, U.S. veterans — many disabled — have begun processing, cataloguing, digitizing and archiving the collection as part of a one-year $3.5 million project, funded with federal stimulus money.

It’s part of the corps’ effort to find American Indian cultural items and return them to tribes or their descendants — something all federal agencies must do under a 1990 law.